Using simple_list_item_2 with an ArrayAdapter (Android)

Today I wanted to display static a ListView of properties and their values. It’s Friday, so I really wanted to do this with as little work as possible. Android’s free layout simple_list_item_2 sounded like what I wanted, but it wasn’t immediately clear how to handle this. There are a lot of lazy ways we can list single values, but Googling around how to use simple_list_item_2 resulted in lots of questions with no real answer.

I found Mark Assad, who parsed the system layout files into raw XML. The led to the magic answer of TwoLineListItem widget. Finding this widget allowed me to write a simple ArrayAdapter of key/value pairs.

adapter = new ArrayAdapter(this,android.R.layout.simple_list_item_2,list){
        @Override
        public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent){
            TwoLineListItem row;
            if(convertView == null){
                LayoutInflater inflater = (LayoutInflater)getApplicationContext().getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE);
                row = (TwoLineListItem)inflater.inflate(android.R.layout.simple_list_item_2, null);
            }else{
                row = (TwoLineListItem)convertView;
            }
            BasicNameValuePair data = list.get(position);
            row.getText1().setText(data.getName());
            row.getText2().setText(data.getValue());

            return row;
        }
    };
listView.setAdapter(adapter);

Hope this saves someone else some time, as I spent an embarrassing amount of time determined to use the simple_list_item_2 layout.